Modus anomali’s artists’ phonological features

ABSTRACT

This study investigates phonological features of Modus Anomali’s artists. Modus Anomali is an Indonesian thriller movie about terror in the wood. All artists are Indonesian. This movie shows the characteristics of English sounds which pronounced by Modus Anomali’s artists. Modus Anomali’s artists are interesting to be analyzed using phonological features since English is uttered by Indonesian; they come from different society and also have different dialect. Their dialects influence their speaking English. Then in this research, the researcher investigates the data based on two problems; 1) What are the characteristics of segmental phonemes pronounced by Modus Anomali’s artists? 2) What are the types of distinctive features found in Modus Anomali’s artists’ utterances? The objectives of the study are to investigate the characteristics of segmental phonemes and to study the distinctive features in Modus Anomali’s artists.

To answer the problem, the researcher adopts Jones’ (2006) theory of phonetics and phonemes, Gussenhoven and Jacobs’ (2011) theory of distinctive features. The researcher also uses PhonTransEdit software to know the Standard English that it is useful to measure the differences of English sound pronounced by the participants. Methodologically, the researcher employs descriptive qualitative as her research design. The data is collected by listening carefully to the dialogues and giving a highlight to the different sound. There are several characteristics of Modus Anomali’s artists when pronouncing English sound and those are necessary to give description in the written form.

The findings show that Modus Anomali’ artists’ pronunciation is different from Standard English because this is influenced by their mother tongue/dialect. The differences of Modus Anomali’s artists with Standard English include the shifting one sound to the other one, e.g shifting vowel, diphthong, and consonant. On the other hand, distinctive features also reveal the minimal pairs of English sound which make foreign language learners are easy to learn the new sound or target language, e.g /f/ contrasts with /v/, /s/ contrasts with /z/, etc.

The researcher suggests to the future researchers to continue this study based on the limitation of this study that is the analysis of suprasegmental phonemes such as duration, juncture and intonation of the utterances. This aspect is very important to be analyzed because it will create a new concept about the characteristics of suprasegmental phonemes which they are pronounced. In addition, it is also suggested to explore another theory of phonological features not only based on segmental and distinctive features. The next researcher can analyze assimilation, dissimilation, etc which are also aspects of phonology. This aspect is very important to be analyzed since this aspect also study about the characteristics of sounds system in language which analyze the alteration of a sound.